gave her moments of pure delight to reflect how little “the people” suspected the reality of the existence of such a world notwithstanding all they read and all they professed, and how absolutely exclusive it was in the very nature of nature; how it had its own language untranslatable, its own creed unbelievable, its own customs unfathomable by outsiders, and yet among the true-born how divinely simple recognition was.  Her allegiance had the loyalty of every fibre of her being; her scorn of the world she had left was too honest to permit any posing in that regard.  The life at Sparta assumed the colors and very much the significance depicted on a bit of faded tapestry; when she thought of it, it was to groan that so many of her young impressionable years had been wasted there.  She hoarded her years, now that every day and every hour was suffused with its individual pleasure or interest, or that keen artistic pain which also had its value, as a sensation, in the Quartier Latin.  It distressed her to think that she was almost twenty-one.

The interminable year that intervened between Elfrida’s return from Philadelphia and her triumph in the matter of being allowed to go to Paris to study, she had devoted mainly to the society of the Swiss governess in the Sparta Seminary for young ladies—­Methodist Episcopal—­with the successful object of getting a working knowledge of French.  There had been a certain amount of “young society” too, and one or two incipient love-affairs, watched with anxious interest by her father and with a harrowed conscience by her mother, who knew Elfrida’s capacity for amusing herself; and unlimited opportunities had occurred for the tacit exhibition of her superiority to Sparta, of which she had not always taken advantage.  But the significance of the year gathered into the French lessons; it was by virtue of these that the time had a place in her memory.  Mademoiselle Joubert supplemented her instruction with a violent affection, a great deal of her society, and the most entertainingly modern of the French novels, which Brentano sent her monthly in enticing packets, her single indulgence.  So that after the first confusion of a multitude of tongues in the irrelevant Parisian key Elfrida found herself reasonably fluent and fairly at ease.  The illumined jargon of the atelier staid with her naturally; she never forgot a word or a phrase, and in two months she was babbling and mocking with the rest.

She lived alone; she learned readily to do it on eighty francs a month, and her appartement became charming in three weeks.  She divined what she should have there, and she managed to get extraordinary bargains in mystery and history out of the dealers in such things, so cracked and so rusty, so moth-eaten and of such excellent color, that the escape of the combined effect from banalite was a marvel.  She had a short, sharp struggle with her American taste for simple elegance in dress, and overthrew it, aiming,